For the purposes of the following description, reference will be made to the terms ‘body components’ and ‘body parameters’. These terms are interchangeable with the terms ‘organs’, ‘bones’ or any other body part associated with, but not limited to, humans or any other living creature. Reference will also be made to the terminology of ‘anomaly’ or ‘anomalies’. These terms are interchangeable with ‘cancer’, ‘tumor’, ‘growth’ or any other negative classification of a physical presence or condition within a living body. Furthermore, reference will be made herein to the term “image”. This term is to be considered for the present description interchangeable with ‘visual image’, ‘audible sound waveform’, ‘X vs. Y. data plot’ or any other stored data terminology. Also, whenever the term “image” is used, unless indicated to the contrary, it also includes the entirety of signals necessary to depict it. This is appropriate because images can be reduced to signals via appropriate signal processing hardware and/or software.
Medical imaging equipment for the testing and/or measurement of internal and/or external body parameters is known. Enormous quantities of medical images exist which were produced for patients seeking diagnosis of health issues and maladies. The content of these images can be summarily categorized as:
a) Body structures which present as normal (i.e., “healthy”).
b) Body structures which present, or are suspected to present, physical anomalies, including but not limited to, cancers, tumors, growths, diseases or other conditions (which manifest as changes in normal tissue), and other abnormal structures.
This invention targets the images in category (b), those with physical anomalies present or suspected.
Depending upon the body component that is being analyzed, there are many recording and imaging technologies that can be employed to acquire the present conditional state of that body component, or that have already been employed to acquire the state of the body component. Such medical equipment will be acquiring and recreating internal imagery in the form of electronic data (waveforms). A commonality of all of these technologies is that there is a requirement, or at least a desire, to analyze the acquired data to determine if there are any pathological or anomalous features that warrant further analysis, investigation, testing or other action.
Analysis or interpretation of this data usually requires highly skilled personnel, such as a radiologist. It is often the responsibility of such personnel to identify any pathological and/or anomalous features. In medical imagery, anomalous features can usually be visually identified by radiologists because for example, they either contain higher intensity values (brighter) or lower intensity values (darker) than the surrounding features within the image.
There is a growing effort to shift the burden of image analysis away from purely manual methods toward machine-assisted methods in order to improve the efficiency and accuracy of reported results. Manual visual analysis is inherently subject to inconsistency because it is highly dependent upon the skill of the individual tasked with the analysis. The accuracy of the analysis across the spectrum of radiologists, or other medical personnel reviewing images, is variable, manifesting in an unacceptable rate of false negatives and false positives. Manual visual analysis relies on a sequence of imperfect technological operations and devices. Once a medical image has been produced by the imaging instrumentation, the image data typically goes through a process involving data reduction, video signal image generation, visual image generation and human visual perception. The process of generating the video image for the radiologist to analyze relies heavily upon the ability of supporting electronic equipment to produce an accurate visual depiction of the image data. Frequently, such equipment is either incapable of such accuracy or is not properly maintained by the operator. The majority of medical image viewing is accomplished with commercial-grade computer monitors which is only adequate for non-critical applications. It is ill advised to utilize these mass-produced monitors in critical viewing applications, such as radiology, as they will introduce undesirable analysis issues. For example, resolution reduction will be required to view the entire image on a commercial monitor, the monitor's panels have uncalibrated image grayscale (contrast) performance, and non-uniform image quality across the display surface and also between otherwise identical monitors. Medical grade monitors, which are calibrated for critical imaging, also introduce issues such as presenting so much resolution across a very large viewing area, that repetitive manual analysis is fatiguing. Erroneous conclusions resulting from this analysis may result in improper treatment or, worse yet, no treatment at all for life-threatening conditions.
The goal of machine-assisted image analysis methods is to maximize the accuracy of the reading of the images by taking the monochrome (grayscale) image (data bitmap) generated by the medical instrument, analyzing the contents of the image and intelligently highlighting any regions which present as suspicious and/or abnormal so that a radiologist can make a more reliable and consistent diagnosis. In a sense, the images are filtered for review by the radiologist. The benefit of these methods is that they are projected to be far more consistent and comprehensive when compared to present entirely manual inspection.
Machine-assisted image analysis methods are known, but often lack the degree of artificial intelligence necessary to guide the processing sequence to search for both recognizable anomalies and historically possible anomalies.
Therefore, there exists a need for an automated method, arrangement, system, apparatus and computer program which encompass the ability to identify and/or present anomalies which human inspection would normally find, and in addition, to identify and/or present anomalies which human inspection would not normally find, but are historically present. The invention, described below, is directly applicable to these requirements.